7 Step Crab Apple Festooning Method with Malus Evereste on MM106 Rootstock

Why MM106 changes the whole calculation

A Malus Evereste grafted on MM106 reaches roughly 2.5 to 3 metres at maturity, which is the single fact that makes hand festooning realistic. On a vigorous rootstock like M25 the same crab apple would throw 4 metre leaders, and bending those into arcs becomes a two person job with ladders. MM106 is semi-vigorous, anchors well in most soils without permanent staking after the third year, and pushes enough one year wood to give you material to work with.

Festooning exploits a simple bit of plant physiology. Sap in an upright shoot races to the tip, feeding extension growth and suppressing the lateral buds along the stem. Bend that shoot below the horizontal and the apical dominance breaks. Auxin distribution shifts, the dormant buds along the curve wake up, and most of them form fruiting spurs instead of more vegetative whips. Evereste responds well because it already fruits freely, so you are nudging an existing tendency rather than fighting the tree.

Step one and two: select and clean the leaders

Work in late summer, around August in the northern hemisphere, when the current season wood has lengthened but is still pliable. Walk round the tree and pick four to six shoots that radiate outward at decent spacing. You want shoots roughly pencil thickness, 40 to 70 cm long. Anything thicker than your thumb has lignified too far and will snap or spring back.

Before bending anything, clean up. Take the Niwaki Okatsune shears to any shoot growing straight into the centre, any pair crossing and rubbing, and the obvious water sprouts shooting vertically from older framework. The Okatsune blades hold an edge that leaves a clean cut close to the collar, which matters because ragged stubs invite canker on Malus. A sharp pair of bypass secateurs handles the thinner stuff under 8 mm. Do not strip the tree bare. You are keeping the radiating shoots you intend to arc plus enough older spur wood to carry this year crop.

Step three: the bend itself

Here is the part people get wrong. They yank the shoot down to vertical and tie it to the trunk, which kinks the wood and kills everything below the crimp. Instead, bring the tip down in a smooth arc so the highest point of the curve sits around the middle of the shoot and the tip ends up pointing at the ground or slightly below horizontal. A gentle U, not a hairpin.

Use soft jute twine or a strip of old bicycle inner tube where the loop passes over the bark. Tie the tip down to a lower branch, to a peg in the soil, or to a small weight. Some growers hang lead fishing weights of 30 to 50 grams off the shoot tips and let gravity do the shaping over a few weeks, which avoids any tie marks on young bark entirely. Check the tension after a fortnight. Wood under tension in warm weather creeps, and a tie that was snug in August can be cutting into the bark by mid September.

Step four: leave it alone through autumn and winter

The ties stay on through leaf fall and the dormant months. That is the whole step. The wood is setting into its new shape and pulling the ties off early undoes the work.

Step five: spring bud assessment

By April the bent shoots break bud along their entire length, and this is where you see whether the bend took. Along the upper side of each arc you should count a run of swelling buds, far more than the shoot would have produced left upright. Most of these will be fruit buds, plump and rounded, with the occasional pointed vegetative bud near the apex of the curve.

If a shoot has thrown a strong vertical from the very top of the arc, that is the tree trying to re establish a new leader. Rub it out with finger and thumb while it is soft, or take it back to one or two leaves with secateurs. Leave it and it steals the vigour you just redirected. Watch also for the tip dieback that sometimes follows a tight bend. A little is normal on Evereste. If more than the last 5 cm browns, the bend was too sharp and the wood cracked internally, so cut back to live tissue above an outward facing bud.

The National Trust gardens that train old orchard specimens use the same August bend and spring assessment cycle on cordons and espaliers, and the British orchard literature from bodies like the RHS describes festooning as a recognised technique for inducing precocious cropping on ornamental Malus. None of this is novel, it is just rarely done by amateurs because it looks alarming the first time you bow a healthy shoot toward the soil.

Step six: release and second season

Once the wood has set, usually after a full year, the ties come off. A properly festooned shoot holds its arc on its own. The fruiting spurs that formed along the curve become permanent, cropping for several years. Now repeat the process on the new one year extensions that grew during the first season, building the weeping, layered canopy outward and downward.

This is the rhythm that builds the classic festooned crab apple, a low dome of arching branches dripping with the small red and orange Evereste fruit from September into the new year. Each autumn you select fresh whips, bend them, tie them, and release the previous batch. Over three or four seasons the tree fills out into a structure that crops far heavier than the same Evereste left to grow upright, because you have systematically converted leader wood into spur wood across the whole canopy. The fruit holds well into winter, which is most of the point of growing Evereste rather than a culinary variety, since the display feeds blackbirds and fieldfares through the lean months and the tree carries colour when little else does.

Fruit thinning is rarely needed on a crab this size, the apples are 2 to 3 cm across and the branches carry them without the tearing strain you would get on a dessert apple. The MM106 root system supplies steady moisture and the tree rarely sheds prematurely in a normal British summer.

Step seven: maintenance pruning after establishment

A festooned Evereste is not a fit and forget tree. Each summer, around July or August, shorten any vigorous vertical regrowth back to three or four leaves to keep the dominance broken and to let light into the spurs. This is the same Lorette style summer pruning used on trained apples, and the Okatsune shears make short work of it.

In the dormant season, thin out any spur systems that have become congested and overlapping after a few years of heavy budding. Crowded spurs produce smaller fruit and trap stagnant air, which raises scab pressure on Malus foliage. Take the oldest, most cluttered spurs back hard and let younger wood replace them. Remove deadwood and any canker lesions, cutting well into clean wood and disinfecting the secateurs between cuts if canker is present. The tree wants a balance, enough framework to carry the weeping habit, enough annual extension to keep generating new arcs, and enough open structure that air moves through the canopy.

The question that catches most people out after a couple of successful years is what happens when the tree stops producing useful one year whips to bend. A mature festooned crab on MM106 eventually slows its extension growth, and at that point the technique shifts from training new arcs to renewing tired spur systems. Whether you keep finding fresh material depends entirely on how hard you summer prune, and that is the balance no fixed schedule can decide for you.